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About terriko

Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they're wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won't agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future.
Terri writes/tweets under the name terriko, enjoys making things and mentoring others and has a plain ol' home page at http://terri.toybox.ca.

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5 thoughts on “Quick hit: Elfquest: A Fan Imagining”

As an Elfquest fan, I must say that I love the look of this fan trailer, the costumes and casting, though I have one point of critique; in this video, dreadlocks equals ‘primitive’ and ‘brutish’, while the (mostly) good elves shown all have silky/wavy hair -_o

This is somewhat tangential, but watching this trailer made me think about how we’ve come to conceptualize elves an inherently exceptionally beautiful – and what that means when we cast people as elves. How do we portray the superhumanly beautiful?

As with the elves from the Lord of the Rings movies, the vast majority of the elves here are white/white-looking, slender and able-bodied, clear skinned, with silky/wavy hair (as Donja points out), traditionally feminine – and in this case, presenting themselves according to modern standards with heavy makeup and shaved skin.

It’s actually a bit *weird* that most of the elves here are white-looking, since there’s an entire race of dark-skinned elves who play a huge role in the series. But it sounds like that was probably case for the same reason there are few men in this trailer: casting for fan work can be very difficult, since no one’s getting paid, so they went with the actresses who fit best.

I looked at the YouTube comments, and I found out that they found actors by asking through their own networks, which may explain the whiteness. People complained that there weren’t enough men, and they said that it was because they couldn’t find suitable male actors who would want to play with them in the woods without pay.

I suspect it’s what happens when people find other people through their own networks, although I might be wrong, since I suspect women might want to network with men more than women, because of men’s access to the more powerful network, in whatever industry.